Trout, Sudoku And Death
TW: Strokes, Cancer, Suicidal Ideation
A while ago I wrote a game called Troutphracts. I wrote the game in 4 hours and made it to last 12 days. In concept it was quite simple. 5 teams which I had written 2-3 sentences of lore for competed to make the most money during that time span. There was a limited amount of trout in the ocean and every day the whole team would send one order of how many boats to send out, additionally players could make one special request a day for something that broke the rules.
It was a simplified version of the Fishbanks Simulation which describes the Tragedy Of The Commons. I had never GMed before but I had set a few rules for myself and set up what I believed to be a fair framework for assesing requests outside the scope of the google doc. As you can probably expect it quickly spiraled for the players, dozens of discord threads opened a day to exchange information on what they had gotten away with requesting, there were issues (fish portals, expectations etc). It failed as what I pitched it as but It succeeded in ways I and I believe some of my players still think back to fondly.
The game ended two days early because I had a stroke.
A while later I wrote another simple game Sudokuphracts. I wrote a paragraph of lore, Made a fairly challenging sudoku grid and gave players rules to travel through the board. They could only see the value of the tile they where on and so had to rely on leaving behind journals which required to be written in-universe as the numbers represented different objects and locations of the world. Players loved the low intensity, it was a small journaling prompt with the chance of someone else adding to it while working toward something greater. I saw some amazing writing in that game.
On day 8 of running it I had a suicidal episode and deleted the server.
I hope the pattern is obvious as when I began running Pocketphracts, the only one of these that was an actual Cataphract by Sam Sorensen session, I was met with my countries entire electric system failing. I ran it to conclusion on a nintendo 3ds browser I bought at a flea market with a scratched Zelda cover.
I was angry, lost, sad. My attempt to create was foiled three times in a row by my body and a situation out of my control. I created something that was truly sustainable for me. Trout took 15 minutes to process, Sudoku 5 minutes. Entirely manually, run as they where written, improvised and off the cuff. I knew myself well enough to know that if I tried to run my Epic Fantasy Cataphract with a complete historiographic debate working as the lore primer it would never get made and frankly what I saw was a lot of hungry players willing to play and just dive right in to what you wanted to create.
Now I write this as I see the community slow down and my body cannot feel its legs. I overworked it for causes that were not related to running these games.
I contemplate my mortality.
I get a direct message from a friend running Misery In Cathigan were Trout was referenced by a player. I observe multiple Cataphract games and variations of "how will this affect the trout population" continue being exchanged. Even though I had lost the games themselves and their records, their history remained, orally. It impacted them, it changed them. I inspire someone to run a play by post roleplay chess game, I write crisis and tactics for Vanguard and greatly contribute suggesting for the Warrior Cats soon to start.
A four hour crazed daze of creativity became people excited to see what I have to say, friends who want to see me rest but once that is done, create more.
I gained something I did not have before. So when I saw someone mock my game for being a "joke", when I saw my points being dismissed because I ran "that fishing game that just happened to get roleplay sickos". I did not feel anything.
The next morning I woke up, not even thinking about these games and talked to my doctor about my chances, the nurse said I had a glint in my eye, I spoke with a springiness that felt more genuine than before. The fear of death was gone. Even though I have grappled with extreme medical conditions for years, for the first time, I truly felt nothing.
I knew that even though I failed to write up and document the sessions at game end, their oral histories lived on and morphed and lived. They contain a part of me.
Through every game I ran in the Phracts space, I almost died. They succeeded in so many ways They failed in spectacular and extremely boring ways.
I brought joy in the face of my own death. Those tales shared in community and conversation are worth a billion write ups.
Run a game. Run it without pretension. Run it simply and run it with love.